Users of various Internet accessible data storage and management services, such as, for example, content management systems, often upload large numbers of content items from various user devices to a data store on such a system. For example, users of various content management systems may take photographs with a smartphone or similar device, and then upload them from their device to one or more accounts on one or more content management systems. Or, similarly, users may acquire various audio files on a device (e.g., by recording with the device, or saving from an email) and subsequently upload them to a content management system. If this is done often, the user may soon realize that his or her memory capacity on the user device is at or very near full capacity. In such an event, a user must delete some content. Obviously content that she has already placed in a remote data store may be the best items to locally delete. But the user does not remember such details.
Accordingly, there is a need to leverage the fact that a content management system may readily identify which content items on a user device have already been uploaded to one or more data stores maintained by the content management system, and thus periodically inform a user that space could be saved on his or her user device by purging such already saved content form the device.